Smith is the 22nd MIT alumnus/ae and Institute’s 110th Commencement speaker dating back to 1880, the earliest year that MIT Commencement records exist at MIT’s Institute Archives and Special Collections. The list of speakers includes President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan SM ’72, 12 alumni, and 11 MIT presidents.

Perhaps the most notable event in MIT’s Commencement history occurred when there was no speaker. In 1970, during the peak of the United States’ conflict in Vietnam, the graduating class requested that then-MIT President Howard Wesley Johnson HM ’66 refrain from speaking in lieu of two minutes of silence for attendees to consider what can be done “to help resolve the conflicts which divide mankind in this country and around the world.”

The first half of the 20th century often featured more than one Commencement per year. Separate ceremonies were held from graduate and undergraduate students in the ’40s, and traditional students and military students often held separate ceremonies in the ’20s and ’30s.

Commencement speakers dating back to 1995 are listed below. Click on the image for the full list of MIT Commencement speakers dating back to Unitarian clergyman George E. Ellis, who addressed MIT graduates in 1880. Share your Commencement speakers memories in the comments below and on Facebook and Twitter.

You may have seen hundreds of MIT alums sporting bright red jackets over Tech Reunions weekend. Harder to spot were the 1.5% of them also wearing gray scarves. Who were they?

They were women, but not just any women. These seven graduates from the class of 1963 who returned to campus – Frances Dyro, F. Margaret Hickey, Christina Jansen, Patricia Marzilli, Ruth Nelson, Vicki Peterson, and Joyce Wolf – were celebrating their 50th reunion.

Photo: Darren McCollester.

To honor these distinguished women, the Association of MIT Alumnae hosted a special reception for them on June 6 in the Margaret Cheney Room overlooking Killian Court. There, AMITA president Sze-Wen Kuo ’73 presented each of seven alumnae with gray scarves to complement their red jackets on reunion weekend.

“When you graduated, MIT was 2.9% female,” said Kuo. “You are our forebears. This year, 48% of the graduating class is women.”

Clearly, the stat impressed. But one alum was quick to add, “Let’s have a bigger celebration when it gets to 50.”

Choi began her work on the project in a UROP for Professor Margery Resnick, who founded the program in 1990, but has continued to interview alumnae in the years since.

“It’s been a very interesting experience,” Choi said, “interviewing these women about their MIT experience and their lives, and transcribing them for the archives. I didn’t realize how much women went through so that I could be here. I’ve learned a lot of history.”

Housed in the Institute Archives and Special Collections, the women’s histories are available for public viewing and are becoming digitized as well. The oldest graduate interviewed comes from the class of 1922. In all, transcripts from over 30 interviews are available.

“We want to fill in the lacunae about women’s participation at MIT,” Professor Resnick said in an interview with the New York Times about the project. “We not only want to do women who have followed their career line as predicted by MIT…but women who have done different things that might be more interesting, but less visible, in terms of their MIT-ness.”

Thursday afternoon’s reception took place in a treasured space for MIT alumnae. The Margaret Cheney Room is named in honor of an 1882 graduate. After Cheney’s untimely death, MIT’s first alumna and Cheney’s instructor, Ellen Swallow Richards, lobbied the Institute to create a space solely for women to congregate, network, and feel at home.

While all alumni are invited to Tech Reunions each June, that is not the only reunion around. Increasingly, living groups, sports teams, or other groups are reconnecting through their own self-organized reunions. And the really savvy groups—like Sigma Chi—have a great time on campus and share the experience with alumni worldwide.

Corporate Board President Dan Craig ’03 welcomed everyone with a brief glimpse of life at MIT when Alpha Theta was founded in 1882.

Video, photo, and commentary document Alpha Theta chapter’s three-day reunion April 27-29. You can browse through the experience from an open house at 532 Beacon Street, the chapter’s Boston home for 95 years, to a black-tie banquet at the Westin Copley Place that drew 300 people. See photos and hear talks about the group’s history and future as well as a memorial for Brian D. Robertson ’96, an entrepreneur who died in 2011.

And then it was back to the classroom for Alpha Theta Academy, which featured three alumni and one undergraduate sharing their life experiences. You can watch videos of their talks:

John Piotti ’83: Sustainable Local Agriculture in Maine

Piotti shared his 15+ years of experience as a leader of Maine’s recent agricultural renaissance, most recently as executive director of the Maine Farmland Trust.

Al Dahya ’05: The Economics and Technology of Solar Power

For the last five years, Dahya has worked for Alpha Theta-founded SunEdison, an early innovator in solar power as a service.

Michael Kirtley ’72: OKA!

Kirtley hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert, beginning a career in photojournalism in Europe and Africa. Most recently he co–produced the newly released feature film OKA! shot in the Central African Republic.

Gabe Blanchet ’13: Thru–Hiking the Appalachian Trail

He took his sophomore spring semester off to thru–hike the Appalachian Trail. In the process, he raised $11,000 for juvenile diabetes research.

Tech Night at Pops is MIT’s longest-running reunion tradition—115 years and counting!—and perhaps the most beloved. Each year, alumni, graduating students, and guests pack Symphony Hall to hear the Boston Pops conducted by Keith Lockhart. While the musical program changes, one tradition remains constant: the balloon drop set to the accompaniment of “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

If you’ve never seen it, it’s quite something. And a perfect way to prep that patriotic spirit for July 4th. Many thanks to Sandy Laeser (wife of Dick Laeser ’62) for the video.

Of course, once all the balloons have dropped there’s nothing left to do but pop them, right?

The Class of 1957 staged a fabulous pre-reunion gathering in Maine that featured the viewing of the rare Transit of Venus. Here’s the story from Martin Zombeck ’57, PhD ’69, who retired from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where he was a senior physicist working in X-ray astronomy. He is author of the Handbook of Space Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“Our MIT Class of 1957 held a reunion at the Stage Neck Inn Monday, June 4–Thursday, June 7. I arranged with the Astronomical Society of Northern New England in Kennebunk to send two amateur astronomers to set up a telescope at the Inn to view the transit of Venus, Tuesday, starting at 6:09 p.m. As a back up, they set up an Internet video feed from one of the observatories on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Venus transiting the Sun photographed at 7:31 p.m., June 5, through the Dobsonian telescope. The small specks are sunspots. Photo: Lee Lancaster.

“Tuesday was completely overcast for most of the day. Miraculously, the clouds parted a few minutes before the start of the transit and we could view it for almost two hours whereupon the Sun set and it rained.

“My classmates think that I arranged the dramatic parting of the clouds. George Moy suggested that I be nicknamed “Moses.” The next transit of Venus will not occur until 2117. None of us had ever witnessed a transit of Venus before this one.”

Technology Day is one of the beloved Tech Reunions traditions, and this year MIT professors and alumni shed light on advanced manufacturing and the promise it holds to inject new vitality into sectors of the economy thought to be in decline and to position America again as a world leader in manufacturing.

This new industrial revolution builds on recent advances in computation, computationally based materials, and robotic processes, and it has the potential to transform manufacturing in all established industrial centers.

If you missed the champagne bars, fireworks, and giant cake, don’t despair. We just published a gallery of photos from Toast to Tech, the culmination of MIT’s sesquicentennial celebration. Head over to the Alumni Association website to take a look, or click on the photo below. To get a real taste of the action, pop open a bottle of bubbly and eat a cupcake while you peruse the pictures.

From left: Class of 1961 classmates Susana Ravecca-Figoli, Marla Moody, Susan Kannenberg, Karlene Gunter, and Marion Weiner Berger prepare to march in the Commencement Procession. They were among 80% of 1961 alumnae who attended this 50th reunion. Photo: Darren McCollester.